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[Mothra]

[spoiler]KIRK <3 KHAN OTP 4 EVA.[/spoiler]

dare the Cumberbatch tumblr legions hope

[Sharkey]

Invoke ye not the the Cumberbitches, lest ye bring them down on all our heads.

[Büge]

[spoiler]So what was the point of the non-mystery of Khan? It's like, Abrams kept this thing a secret, so he can't use it in promoting the film, which might have interested any lapsed Star Trek fans. And Khan doesn't have any cultural cachet apart from a screaming Kirk gif, so they didn't build up any personal conflict he may have had with Kirk. They wasted a perfectly good opportunity! All this movie will do is invite comparisons to Wrath of Khan.[/spoiler]

[Smiler]

Bebop Cucumberpatch has a pretty good name.

[Büge]

[Disposable Ninja]

Bebop Cucumberpatch has a pretty good name.

... now I want Benedict Cumberpatch to play Spike Spiegel.

[Büge]

He's got the build for it!

[Sharkey]

And very little else, unfortunately. The guy wouldn't be my first pick for disarmingly playful rogue or however you'd describe Spike. On the other hand, he'd be a pitch-perfect Vicious.

Actually, you know what? I'm casting Michael Cera as Spike. Fuck you.

[Büge]

Actually, you know what? I'm casting Michael Cera as Spike. Fuck you.

Really? You don't want to see Keanu Reeves deadpan his way through the role?

[Sharkey]

You win at bad idea game.

[Sharkey]

Half in the Bag articulates most of my feelings about the flick very well, as usual. Though I do think Bengledick Cabbagepatch Englebug Slaptyback Sherlock did as much as one possibly could with that script.

[Thad]

Thoughts.  Spoiler of thing you probably knew four years ago even if you haven't seen the movie.

[TA]

Well, three thoughts on that whole Situation.  [spoiler]First, Khan Noonien Singh was Sikh, not Mexican, even if the actor first cast to play him was Mexican - it was the 60s, and they really only went as far as "brown's brown".

Second, in-story, I'd assume that him looking completely different was part of the John Harrison persona - if you're drafting History's Greatest Monster into your secret ops division and creating a fictional identity for him, it kinda makes sense you'd change his appearance dramatically while you're at it.  You'd tell Hitler to shave if you don't want people to recognize him as Hitler.  So it does kind of make sense that he wouldn't be Sikh.

Third, to quote the screenwriter, "Basically, as we went the casting process and we began honing in on the themes of the movie, it became uncomfortable for me to support demonizing anyone of color, particularly any one of middle eastern descent or anyone evoking that. One of the points of the movie is that we must be careful about the villain within US, not some other race."  I can understand, and to a degree get behind, the not wanting to make another movie about The Evils Of Brown People.[/spoiler]

Fourth, Benedict Cumberbatch is really really good, pasty or no.  This is no Last Airbender.

[TA]

What really struck me were all of the Trouble With Tribbles callouts.  Since for a while there, the rumors/speculation were that the villain was Arne Darvin.

[Mothra]

I mean, Benedict Cumberbatch did a very, very good job. I wish they'd found a middle eastern or mexican guy again, but, at the end of the day, I can't complain about who they picked, because he did great.

This is a great point, however:

...moreover, there are some rather regressive overtones in making the ultimate genetic model of a human being a pasty white guy.

That said, Thad, I'm not sure if you're serious about it being ludicrously hard to swallow Khan changing races between movies. It's fairly clear that, while they'll throw a bone out here and there continuity-wise, this isn't really going to hold up as an alternate history. It's just a remake of the show. If they want to change something completely, they'll do it. For one, in this movie alone, Kronos had already detonated, decades too early.

[Thad]

Well, right, hence the part where I said it would be a lot easier to ignore if they didn't keep hitting us with constant, intentional callbacks to Wrath of Khan.  [spoiler]Kirk's death and KHAAAAAAAAAAAN[/spoiler] are the most obvious but just a couple of beats in a film that gets WAY too cute about being The Same Thing, Only Different.

The theory that [spoiler]they deliberately changed his appearance so no one would recognize him[/spoiler] is clever, but it's one of those cases where fans have to make up a reason that nobody bothers to put in the script.  Besides which, [spoiler]if they really asked him to fake a British accent, why would he keep doing it after he went off the reservation?  Pretending to be another Londoner while he sends Mickey Smith off to blow up the base is one thing, but why's he keeping up the act when he's explaining his origin story to Kirk?[/spoiler]

[patito]

[spoiler]Third, to quote the screenwriter, "Basically, as we went the casting process and we began honing in on the themes of the movie, it became uncomfortable for me to support demonizing anyone of color, particularly any one of middle eastern descent or anyone evoking that. One of the points of the movie is that we must be careful about the villain within US, not some other race."  I can understand, and to a degree get behind, the not wanting to make another movie about The Evils Of Brown People.[/spoiler]

Oh, so I guess only the white man is good enough to be history's greatest monster, is that it.

[Thad]

And I suppose we could argue that Montalban, not Cumberbatch, had the wrong accent for a guy named "Singh".  But I always preferred the idea that Khan was a deliberate hodgepodge of races/ethnicities/national origins.  Because that's a very Star Trek idea, that the Ultimate Human would be a combination of everybody.

On dee utter hand, "casting a guy who's really bad at the accent he's supposed to be doing" is also wery Star Trek.

[Thad]

Oh, so I guess only the white man is good enough to be history's greatest monster, is that it.

Har.

There IS something to be said for the dilemma between the negative stereotype of the Evil Brown Man and the also-regressive idea that minorities should ONLY be depicted as heroes.  (Remember Thor's old bit about the Street Fighter 2 opening of White Guy Punching Black Guy, how it was changed to two white guys in the Genesis version, and how really there's no possible permutation of that scene that doesn't play to either a stereotype or an exclusion?)

Trek's certainly got its share of positive depictions of minority characters, but I see the point that there's not really a prominent example of Latino/Sikh/however you want to classify Khan.  (And obviously lumping all brown people together carries its own baggage.)

The original TMNT cartoon turned Baxter Stockman into a white guy, presumably because it didn't want the only black guy on the show to be a villain.  (Course, the only black guys on the shows were STILL villains, it's just that one of them got turned into a warthog a couple episodes in and his race was never acknowledged again, and the other one was a black guy voicing a Japanese guy who looked like a white guy and spent most of the show hiding his face anyway.)

(There's also a whole sidebar about April's ethnicity and whether or not she was whitewashed; from what I understand, Eastman intended her to be biracial -- and in fact based on his own then-girlfriend, also named April -- and Laird didn't know that.)

Comparisons to unrelated franchises aside, I'm inclined to think, as usual, that the answer is more diversity and not less -- but the script didn't make much room for any new Good Guy characters.  The cast is pretty much People We Saw in the First Movie, Established Characters from Wrath of Khan, Bad Guys, and Cannon Fodder (with some overlap across some of those categories).

[TA]

My understanding of Khan was not that he was all of the world's most evil creatures combined to make the most evil possible thing, but rather that he was - along with all the other Augments - a normal fetus that was extensively upgraded.  He wasn't supposed to be absolutely genetically perfect, because there's no such thing - rather, he's superhumanly intelligent and strong and everything built on top of the template of a Sikh baby.